Writing » Topical Writing
A Young Person’s Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life
Posted inWriting Posted in genresMikesplainingMusic Theory

Infrequently Asked Questions: A Young Person’s Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life

I have some time to kill so I thought I would write a brief overview of the concept of time signature in response to some questions that arose recently from non-musicians.

Just a word, this post was originally submitted to a long-ago fan club email list for an older musician, hence many uses of music from the '60s and '70s as examples, most especially The Beatles, who often kept things both simple enough to be clear, but interesting enough to be useful and well-known examples. That's just how it is.

PART 1: A Young Person's Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life

Ok. When you listen to a song, it has a beat. This is what you tap your feet to, or maybe drum your fingers on a desk.

The most common beat in rock and roll might be written something like this. "boom-boom-BOMP-bum, boom-boom-BOMP-bum,…

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Writing » Topical Writing » Mikesplaining (Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions)
IAQs—More Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions
Posted inWriting Posted in genresMikesplaining

Knowledg Is Poweh: IAQs—More Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions

1. What's the difference between a sauce and a condiment? - Susan W., Tallahassee, FL

A condiment enhances the flavor of food and is used sparingly. A sauce adds an additional flavor or richness of its own to the dish, and may be used generously.

2. Is there a name for that special credit where at the end of a bunch of TV or movie credits you get one that's like "and WILLIAM P. DINWIDDIE as LORD HALFANDHALF?" - Jim S., San Francisco, CA

I'm glad you asked that, Jim. Frequently as part of the negotiations involved in taking a part in a TV show or movie, an agent will include a stipulation that the actor gets a certain special credit in the opening credits or, in the case of a movie, on the poster. They may strike a deal for a…

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Ideological Musings
Against Libertarianism, Almost
Posted inWriting Posted in genresIdeology & BeliefsFrom The Archives

Just A Dab’ll Do Ya: Against Libertarianism, Almost

Foreword about "Against Libertarianism", 2023

I wrote this, originally a blog post, about 10 years ago. Nowadays I have more to say about this, but for the moment this stands with minor editorial revisions but significantly as I originally posted it. As per my Terms & Conditions nothing on this site should be construed as conveying my current (or even past) beliefs, and although I still do agree with most of what I said here, this post is to me, today, a starting point for kicking off discussion, not the final word on it.

I do have some further thoughts which I will get written down and posted at some point, and without which my full views on Libertarianism cannot be said to be expressed. There is a solution: Libertarianism could maaaaaaybe conceivably work, but there's another side of the story, which nobody…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresReflectionsThe Beast Within

Reflective Prose: Fascination, And Dangerous Weather

Springtime hits hard in some quarters. I call this 'dangerous weather'—like, you've got to watch out where you're going. You might trip and fall. Somehow this always coincides with the rise of halters and midriff shirts.

Fascination, you know, is a universal feeling. I hesitate to call it an emotion, it's more than that, it's a condition, a thesis. It's strongly rooted in our biology, I think. I'm sure our closest animal relations feel it the same way we do. It's tough to know what's on a housecat's mind most of the time, but when he's gazing at that fish swimming around that bowl, I know exactly where his head is. And it's not "I'm hungry" or "how can I get that?" or "in a moment I shall execute my plan", as you might think. It's not something that rational, like when he wants something—in that case he meows, shuffles…

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Ideological Musings
weathered decrepit supple gossamer diaphanous god. opalescent angels and devils. Maxfield Parrish. HR Giger. Extremely detailed, cluttered. Messy. Scary. Memento Mori. Insects. Religion. 3
Posted inWriting Posted in genresMisc BrainspillTackling The Big Issues

The Most Evil Words

I think "fuck 'em" are the most evil two words, the worst thought, in the English language.

Maybe they're not terribly evil, said once, by themselves. But no words are. Catastrophic evil is a compound phenomenon.

"Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."
-Stanislaw J. Lec

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
The Funniest Man In The World
Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal EvidencePortrait Gallery

These Are The People In My Neighborhood: The Funniest Man In The World

The other night I talked to my old friend Zigmo Parcheesi, the funniest man in the world. He told me he took his toddler son Max to his first movie. "Oh, yeah?" I asked. "What did you choose to scar him with?"

"Porn. We took him see some hardcore pornography. Told him we were going to show him how he was made. 'Not like that.... not like that... not like that... Yes! Like that!... No, no, not like that!... Not like that... not like that...'"

A few years ago, Zigmo moved out to the edge of the woods in northern New Jersey. I asked him, "New Jersey? have you seen the jersey devil yet?"

Without missing a beat, he said, "No, I haven't seen the jersey devil, but I have been to the mall."

Later, before getting off the phone, he told me, "If you ever…

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Writing » Topical Writing
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresMisc. Thoughts & Brainspill

Marginal Thinking Dept.: You Can Quote Me On That (Other Assorted Short Topical Writings)

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Yee Haw: Texas

I'll tell you about Texas. Back in '95, me and my friend Haley went down to his Dad's timeshare in Port Aransas, Texas, a little beach resort town about 45 minutes south of Corpus Christi, for a week of sportfishing on the gulf. So, the first night in town, we go out on the town, hit a bunch of bars. We come to this one bar, where they tell us they haven't got their liquor license yet, so, by some strange twist of Texan logic, all drinks cost $2.

So we go and have a drink. And behind the bar, there's this girl, it's not politically correct but I can only describe this girl as a "Texas honey"—pretty, curly blond hair, cowboy hat. And we're there a few minutes, and this older guy starts hassling us, making drunken accusations, saying we're with the liquor board or something, and the only…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Manhattan: New York Stories, Which I Only Now Realize Are All About Petty Crimes

Originally posted on my old site. I'd have called this "New York After Dark", but the souvlaki guy story happened in the middle of the afternoon.

Back in the '80s & early '90s New York City was much different than it is now. Filthy, violent, and the meat packing district was a not a place you went after dark. I used to jot down my day-to-day experiences there. I truthfully didn't realize, until I collected a few of them together on this page, how, uh, bad it was. (And I'll tell you what, these are the milder stories that are fit for public consumption and won't scare my mom if she reads this site. Take me out for a beer sometime and I'll tell you some real stories.)

Looking out for the homeless

After a night of shooting on a small movie I was doing sound…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Seattle: Irene & Sheri

This was originally posted on my old website, Life In A Mikeycosm.

Before you read this, I should warn you. This story contains one of the grossest things I've ever heard. By the end of the story, things improve and it winds up as one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me... but if you're at all sqeamish, if you're the sort of person who just can't watch some of David Cronenberg's best movies, you really might want to skip this one.

This is all true. I swear to you. This has not been exaggerated or distorted for the sake of a good narrative... no embellishment could supersede the actual events. Although, one change I made is to divide what happened into three acts, for narrative purposes. It didn't happen that way originally, it was just one thing and then another, one long…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresReflectionsNocturnal Submissions

Reflective Prose: Day Nights

I gotta do something about them day nights.

I was just walking home from the store, bopping down the street at 11 PM, a time that I grew up believing was a sensible time to be in bed. 1 AM used to be alien terrain, exotic, strange. 2 AM—well, that might as well have been a million o'clock. It was like the furthest frontier. The night might have gone on forever beyond that, for all I knew, ending only when the last human had decided to go to bed before we could all wake up in the daylight again.

Nowadays the small hours of the morning are familiar to me. More than familiar—ordinary, 1 AM no more mysterious than 1 in the afternoon (and probably not as mysterious as 10 AM, a time I haven't seen in many months but that somehow still fails to hold a fascination for me.)…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresSelf-Portraits In Prose

Question of the day: When was the first time you noticed someone cheating at something?

A few years back, my friend Al Katkowski was something of a success with his "Question Of The Day" iphone app and subsequent book. This was a question from the book.

Question of the day: When was the first time you noticed someone cheating at something?

Actually, the first person I noticed cheating would be myself. I totally figured it out on my own before ever seeing anyone else do it. I think I got my first inkling when I was 4 and tried to tell my friend Stephen Axeman I was 4 1/2, not 4, because I thought it made me sound grownup. Somehow he knew I wasn't 4 1/2! So when I turned 4 1/2, I told him again, and he said, "Yes, today you are." I never found out how he knew exactly when my half-birthday was, but it was an epiphany that mysterious means…

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Writing » Topical Writing
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresOpinionsPop Culture Iconoclasm

Whom Rods Destroy: Speak To Me Not Of Picard, Nor Janeway — An Irascible Screed On Star Trek Fandom Fundamentals

Look; I'm a Star Trek fan. Don't talk to me about "Picard" or "Janeway" or "Archer" or whoever. Even the movies barely qualify as "Star Trek", and they have the original cast. I'm not talking about some chick flick where they spend more time talking about feelings than getting into swashbuckling adventures with fearsome aliens on what was supposed to be a routine planetary survey of Gamma Hydra II***. I saw an entire episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where Picard lives a whole secondary life in which he did nothing but drink cosmopolitans and gossip with Charlotte and Miranda. I bet he's never even once been trapped in a cavern lit by creepy red and purple klieg lights and cloned against his will by a scientist who sacrificed his essential humanity when he transferred his mind into an eternal, physically perfect android body. So why would I want…

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Writing » Life In A Mikeycosm (Thoughts & Reflections)
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresLifestyleDealing With It AllLife In A Mikeycosm

Temporal Moronomy: The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I’m Not Turning 40)

I originally wrote this essay shortly before my 40th birthday, after which I posted it on my blog and a number of other places.

December, 2008

For the record, I was born on Dec. 11, 1968. I turned 39 last year, on Dec. 11, 2007. I can't say I thought about it much, at least at first. But a month or two ticked by, and I thought of a number. The number 40. Just as I had thought of the number 40 on December 11th of ten years previous, in 1998, it having arisen unbidden following a brief consideration of the number 30.

Nine years before that I thought about the number 21, 18 three years before that, and five years earlier still, 13.

According to conventions of the religion I was born into, I became a man at 13, amidst much fanfare from my family.…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—San Francisco: Tales From The Sidewalks Of San Francisco

An Afternoon At The Races, Unplanned

So, last night I was standing on Mission in South of Market with my phone out, trying to find a nearby hardware store, when off in the distance, maybe a block behind me, I thought I heard a voice yell, "Stop!"

My mind went off into a daydream for a second—what if there's a thief coming my way, and I get to trip him up? But wait—what if the "thief" is actually a victim in danger, being chased by a criminal, and I'd be helping the criminal by stopping him? What should I do? I didn't have time to think more than that, though, because from a half a block away, clearly now, I heard a panicked man's voice: "Stop!"

Now, I had my phone in one hand, which is chained to my belt, and my very heavy briefcase slung over my back, so…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresMemoirs & Reflections

Essay-Length Memoir: Ars Moriendi—Haley’s Epitaph

Disclaimer, 2023

Having come a long way from the days related herein, I thought for a while before reposting this 26-year-old piece of writing, originally posted on my old website.

I think it has merit as a piece of my own writing and as a remembrance of someone I liked and cared about, despite how difficult he sometimes made it. But now that I'm doing things online under my real name, I do have to stop occasionally and think twice about how some of the less conventional anecdotes from my youth might be misinterpreted. I lead a very quiet life nowadays, but when you do business with people, sometimes you find yourself in an unwanted relationship with someone who loves dirt, reasonable or not, and you'll get painted as a bad guy by certain of those people only because they feel it may profit them to do…

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Writing » Topical Writing » Reviews & Criticism
Fragrance Reviews
Posted inWriting Posted in genresReviewsOpinions

Review Compendium: Fragrance Reviews

Unbeknownst to anybody except Dan Sonenberg—in fact, practically unbeknownst to even myself—I occasionally write fragrance reviews. These are those. Some people enjoy them.

Those of you with the nose can find me on Fragrantica.

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresMemoirs & Reflections

Essay-Length Memoir: “The Light Shone On Me”

Foreword:

For some reason, I've always been particularly moved by a sense of loss. It's the sole valuable observation I ever got from a kindly but not particularly effective therapist I saw for a while in my 30s, one of the few deep and profoundly true things about myself I hadn't already excavated on my own in my decades of frequent navel-gazing before that.

I've always written a lot—although I never considered myself a writer, so much as just someone who writes things down a lot—and in my 20s I had started occasionally writing longer essays, when I felt moved to. At a certain point, a few years after writing this one, I believe, I realized the longer pieces that I always felt were the most successful, the ones I had labored in love over and really eventually did manage to express what I had set out to…

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Writing » Topical Writing » Reviews & Criticism
Literally <strike>Hundreds of</strike> Like A Thousand Capsule Movie Reviews
Posted inWriting Posted in genresMovie Reviews

Review Compendium: Literally Hundreds of Like A Thousand Capsule Movie Reviews

If you don't want to read the introduction you can skip straight down to the reviews.

Introduction

A number of years ago I started jotting down summaries of movies I've watched, just to keep track of what I'd seen. As the years went by, the list grew, and occasionally (but not often) I was moved to write more, until finally I wound up with hundreds of them, mostly very short summaries but occasionally a little more in-depth for movies I particularly liked or loathed. There's a brief section of favorites and honorable mentions, then below that they're indexed by movie title, click a letter to see the titles starting with that letter.

By the way: this list is extremely heavy, although not exclusive, with horror and science fiction films, because that's what I watch most.

A word about my terminology

As I wrote these reviews just for myself, I…

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Writing » Life In A Mikeycosm (Thoughts & Reflections)
Kwitter, the one-user social network
Posted inWriting Posted in genresSocial Media Addiction

Social Mediocrity: Kwitter, the one-user social network

I quit Twitter a while back, and sometimes even just glancing at FB consumes a full day, so I have no outlet for my amusing social-media-worthy passing thoughts, except to just think them privately to myself. And that's so 20th century.

So this page is my new one-person social network, "Kwitter", a place to post thoughts, which I call "Kwits". Anyone who is me is invited to register and post.

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Writing » Life In A Mikeycosm (Thoughts & Reflections)
Shower thoughts
Posted inWriting Posted in genresRandom Brain DroppingsFun

Even In The Quietest Moments: Shower thoughts

Idea for a movie: A time traveling refugee from the 1990s is stuck in another era and must try to blend in, but is found out when it is discovered he knows how to correctly pronounce the names Shania, Tyra, and Demi.

Geezer Butler, bassist for the band Black Sabbath, came up with the idea for heavy metal music when the band drove past a movie theater showing a horror film, and there was a ticket line up the block. He thought to himself that if people like so much to be scared, what if he wrote music that was like a horror movie?

So, I wonder... what would the world be like today if the band had taken a different route, and driven past an X-rated theater instead?

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but must use Wordpress to do it?

Ice…

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Writing » Topical Writing
“Are you free?”, and Other Ideological Musings
Posted inWriting Posted in genresPoliticsAxe-Grinding

Ideology In Brief: “Are you free?”, and Other Ideological Musings

Let's talk about sex! No, wait, let's talk about something even more taboo!

These are some samples of political, ideological, or economic thoughts I've jotted down. I don't consider myself an authority on these things, for sure, I just like to think things through, and as I like to say, for me these kinds of writings are intended to open a conversation, not to be the final word.

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